Study casts light on why Stamford residents dislike developers

Barry LyttonDecember 14, 2018

STAMFORD — Many residents say they dislike the developers that are reshaping their neighborhoods, and recent initiatives by some city representatives showcase the burgeoning political might of a loosely organized movement hoping to question whether this level of growth is good.

Unclear is why people feel that way. Their reasoning varies with each oppositional stand: Some say they want to protect history, others believe the city is becoming a congested nightmare. Many say the city is too loose with its regulations, and still more say all the new building fails to hold down their taxes.

At public hearings this year, you could check-off each claim during talk of controversial plans.

Researchers from of the University of California-Los Angeles earlier this year sought to elucidate why residents feel this way in an experimental survey of residents in Los Angeles County. In a working paper, Paavo Monkkonen and Michael Manville wrote that they hoped to learn whether people hate development or developers, and why.

Is it pure, “Not In My Backyard” syndrome, so-called NIMBYism, or is it truly worries over traffic? Does regulation — like the circuitous 356-page Stamford Zoning Regulations — play a role?

What they found might not surprise you, but highlights why people are so animated in a city awash in special exceptions, and zoning map and text changes that make way for Stamford’s rapid growth.

An entire group, the Stamford Neighborhood Coalition, was formed around changing how land-use boards see such changes and hopes to eradicate the edits. Coalition members say that builders should stay within the bounds of city regulation.

That feeling alone might play a huge role in the growing opposition to Stamford development, the study shows.

“When we told survey respondents that a developer may have received special permission to build, and that he would make a large profit, (they) became far more hostile to new housing,” researchers wrote.

Further exacerbating discord between residents and builders is the developers’ apparent wealth. For example, the company tearing down the old cylindrical St. John Tower across from City Hall to replace it with a large apartment complex is a branch of the nation’s largest home builder, Lennar.

“Many expensive cities are heavily-regulated, and in such cites only aggressive developers can afford to build,” the study said. “The prevalence of such developers might reinforce negative stereotypes about them and fuel animus against them.”

The study also points out that opposition to new housing might not be in many residents’ long-term interest. New supply could drop rent and make Stamford — among the most expensive cities to reside — cheaper.

“In opposing new development to protect common goods, renters also promote higher rents, making their behavior at least partly contradictory: renter activism keeps rents high. That seeming contradiction, however, might be explained by a temporal and spatial mismatch between the scale at which new development helps renters and the scale at which renters experience new development,” researchers wrote.

“(But) the new housing itself is often expensive, and depending on where it is built, it could make average neighborhood rents rise quickly, while only slowly making citywide rents fall. Renters could, as a result, view new housing as a source of rising rather than falling rents.”